November 5, 2009 by Andrew McCarthy

Human Resources and Financial applications are traditionally robust and feature rich, yet complicated, and require a lot of information from the user in order to accomplish a task or complete a transaction.

Most of us only touch our HR and Finance applications once in a while.  So Workday's design and development teams work hard to provide expert users the rich capabilities they need, while helping occasional users accomplish things quickly and accurately.

The team's core philosophy: get in, get it done, and get out.

Think about the shopping experience at Amazon.com.  If you know what you want, you can complete you transaction in about three steps: search, select and purchase.  If you need more help, or want a review or recommendation, those details are never far away.

With Workday 9, we're taking that same approach.

For most employees and managers, a visit to Workday is about getting something specific done: approving an expense, hiring a contractor, or giving a valued employee a salary increase (yes, I'm an optimist).  Our new manager and employee user experience is designed to help those occasional users find the information they need and complete their transaction simply and quickly.  In the case below, we've simplified the required fields down to just the basics needed to get in, get a hire done, and get back to work. 

But...underneath the additional information dial...is all the detail, if the user
needs it.  

We also provide a way for users to enter and track comments.  Too often a session that started out as 'I need to get this done' turns quickly into 'I don't want to mess this up.'  Our comment field gives the occasional user a relief valve to converse or ask a question as part of the process.  Help, feedback and recommendations are there when you need them.  As an example, here's an expense reimbursement for a candidate.  The hiring manager and the recruiter sort out questions as part of the process - in order to get to the final approval. 

Our creative director, Scott Lietzke put together a short paper with a more perspective on our user experience approach, and we've also posted an online demonstration of some of the new employee and manager UE capabilities in Workday 9.  Looking forward to your feedback.

­ - Andrew